Erin and Albert…

By the time Curie was 22 months, we were already pregnant with Elia. There is not another bun in the oven and that does make us a little sad. It is with that eye that we watch Elia’s growth with that much more sense of holding on.

They say that when kids hit 50 words, their speech explodes. Elia is just at the cusp of this and will repeat almost any word you say to her almost as if she is trying it out. And every new word she learns is an achievement that she indoctrinates with hand clapping and repetition. Just the other day she learned “yellow,” not “lellow” like Curie says, but fully articulated yellow and could identify it as a color. Her face completely lit up and when she knew she had it right and immediately identified a yellow car parked near by. We gave a few more colors, “blue” and “purple,” but these she just repeated without the same depth of understanding.

Curie was speaking at this point, so when we interact with Elia, it is different; there is an amazing and heartwarming mix of non-verbal and verbal communication, somehow more intimate, that makes Elia even more remarkable and cute.

She loves to identify “Jie-jie,” “Mama,” and “Dada,” and when you ask her she will point to them and will point to herself when you ask her to identify “Elia.” Her favorite word is still “My! My!”meaning mine and repeated like the seagulls in Finding Nemo. “Thu-thu,” thank you, “bubbo,” bubble, “mo,” more, “mo-mo” milk. Says “neigh” for horses, “mao” for cats, and “cack” for what ducks say.

Elia knows when we give Curie something first and we have to work on not making her feel like a second class citizen. When we give Curie an iPad, Elia will chime up and say “mine? Mine?” until we give her her own. She asks for “wuff-wuff,” the Disney short Feast, or “Ah-ah,” for Anna or Elsa for Frozen, and asks for “Moue” (the same way Curie used to say it) the most, Mickey Mouse (she can do the little games in the Mickey Mouse Road Rally game). Her favorite show though is Harry the Bunny, which is a little sensory show a couple minutes long that ends with “bye-bye Harry the Bunny, bye-bye funny bunnies,” where Harry waves. Elia waves with him and will run to the TV to point at the icon to play him. Her other favorite show is Play with Me Sesame, which she calls “E-mo,” for Elmo. She will follow Ernie’s instructions looking up and down or raising her thumbs, and she loves clapping along with Grover.

Elia’s “yesh” for yes, has transformed into a “yawp” for yup recently which is accompanied with her single head nod. She understands so much more than before, she loves to clean and will take your plate away from you to put in the sink even if you are not done eating yet. If you tell her to throw something away, she will put it in the garbage. Her OCD makes her ask for napkins every few minutes to clean her hands as she eats, but it does not compel her to use her fork or spoon necessarily. When Erin went on a trip she cried inconsolably, but when we told her “Mama is on a trip,” and she replied “ohh!” as if it was a new thing to comprehend. She understands talking on the phone now instead of someone in or behind the phone.

Elia continues to be fearless, standing on chairs and lowering herself off of high places. She loves to ride on our backs and shoulders, Mama, Papa, and Curie too (well not on Curie’s shoulders). She is fearless on even the tallest slides, and wants to go wherever Curie goes. She IS afraid of dogs though, even though at the same time she will go out of her way to see them. She has been walking into doors and falling a lot recently. She fell off the bed, off a slide, off a chair, the little mark on her forehead is not a shadow, but a bruise that seems to be ever-present.

We waited until the day Curie turned three to give her a hotdog and popcorn, but Elia has already hijacked Curie’s hotdog at 21 months and will eat the entire thing, when Curie will only eat half. She wants her own things now and wants parity if Curie gets something. This has meant that she has claimed the little bicycle in the living room as hers and Curie’s Minnie Mouse jacket as well. At Great Country Farms, when we bought animal food in little sealed cups, Elia needed to have her own which she held like a prized possession. While Curie fed the animals with her feed, Elia clutched the cup in the crook of her elbow and would not give it up. She did not end up using all of her feed.

The best thing recently is when she sings to herself when she doesn’t know anyone is listening. Her favorite song is a rendition of Let it Go that you can just make out. She raises her hand to one side and tries to twirl when she sings, if you catch her she will grin and continue, but when she doesn’t know you are looking, it is positively adorable. Parenting is stressful and you forget to take care of each other as spouses, if you are not careful, you take each other for granted at best and hurt each other at worst. It is balanced by the beauty and joy of children, and we are careful to make choices that protect the family the most. We must practice what we preach – when we tell Curie that beauty comes from within, sometimes that means sacrificing personal ambition and success for the sake of family, and that doing the right thing makes us beautiful right?

Elia has this “hee haw” laugh that is completely unadulterated: “uh hyunh, uh hyunh, uh hyunh.” Not baby-like, not lady-like, more than a snort, all adorable. She often likes to cover her mouth when she laughs with the palm of a whole open hand.

It has been a magnificent month for Elia. At the beginning of the month she began saying “Julie” and “Poppop,” and almost “Grandmom.” She would repeat “merrily, merrily” during Row, Row, Row Your Boat. She was captivated at Thomas Land and would call the trains “tu-tu.” And if it were just that, we would have been happy with her progress.

Something clicked on our trip to New Orleans with Bernard and his family. She began saying “thank you” – “thu-thu” after everything you give her (especially when you are feeding her roasted and cracked watermelon seeds in the car), and most importantly she learned the word “mine,” which sounds more like an abbreviated “main.” Since then, she has become very possessive about everything, though Erin suspects that she has always been possessive, but can only now articulate it. She started to sing “ah town” from Wheels on the Bus for “all through the town,” when we sing it with her, and more impressively, will now sing “Let it go,” to herself spontaneously on her own. She sings a lot of it, but the most recognizable part is “De de doh!”

And Frozen is a funny thing (the worst thing to ever happen to parents according to a father at Curie’s birthday party), you see, Elia thinks she is Elsa too, while Curie thinks she is Anna. So Elia reaches for the same Elsa things as Curie. Also when she says “Ah-ah,” you could interpret it as “Anna,” but she is really saying “Elsa.” When we bought Curie an Elsa dress and t-shirt, we had to buy one for Elia as well; when she put on the shirt she was so proud as she pointed with both index fingers to her belly at the picture on her shirt.

Physically Elia has expanded her dancing to include bouncing with her knees as she dances. She is very musical and will sing and dance at the best times. She also has a great butt shake for “Shake it off.”We are becoming very aware of a second child attention-need thing going on. On our New Orleans trip she loved holding hands with the twins, Eleanor in particular, going so far as to call Eleanor’s name repeatedly when the twins went back to their room.

On the trip, she played with the four stuffed rabbits we brought on our trip by throwing them into the crib as a game, and most interestingly, she was the one holding the little tablet with everyone crowded around her to watch Frozen Fever and loved the attention, so much so that she cried when everyone left. She is able to watch phones and tablets without constantly hitting the screen now, and no longer sweeps food off the table when she is done eating.

Curie’s birthday was a bowling party and we took the kids to the lane to get them used to it before the party. Elia loved it both times. She loves bowling, LOVES the shoes, loves the balls, and loves the video games. She claps and laughs after pushing the ball down the ramp, then bursts into tears when it disappears at the end until the ball shows up again at the ball return and then repeats the whole process. Then again Elia likes playing peek-a-boo, whereas Curie would look at you like, “why are you covering your eyes?”

On Curie’s birthday, Erin’s parents came down and her mother took the kids out to the back to clean the backyard (we still haven’t raked last fall’s leaves) not realizing that Elia is a mosquito magnet, even more than Albert putting her on the low man position when we go out. The doctor has recommended mosquito repellant, but Erin’s mother did not know, so Elia got terrible bites on her arms legs and face. Unfortunately two bites were near her eye where there was a small cut. Despite using hydrocortizone, the next day, Curie’s birthday party day, her eye had swollen almost shut. She looked like Rocky at the end of the first and second and third movies’s fights. We took her to the pediatrician (while still getting Curie’s party going), and got two oral medications, a cortizone and an antibiotic for cellulitis. Poor Elia. The medication is working so she is fine, and she never missed a beat in her good mood. One note, we always have had to fight with Curie to take medicine, but the last time we gave Curie antibiotics, Elia wanted some too, so now that she has medicine, she will take it without hassle.

So it has been a wonderful month. Just the other day she added “yes” to her vocabulary complementing the drawn out and musical “no” she likes to say while she shakes her head. Each new word that Curie hears Curie says “Mommy! She said ‘X,’ that’s her first word!” Which is in and of itself adorable. She is experimenting with climbing stairs while holding hands, she is still scared of the vacuum, she loves taking pictures with the camera. She puts the ball in the basketball hoop, and ate Curie’s hotdog the other day, even though she is not supposed to have hot dogs yet. She loves the shower, she loves the pool, she loves washing her hands. She is so good tempered and it is wonderful to see her and Curie play together.

Bedtime for the kids goes like this. At bedtime, Erin takes Elia up to the room to nurse and sleep. Albert watches Curie, then Curie goes up and wakes up Elia accidentally, so Albert comes up and takes Elia downstairs while Curie goes to sleep. Albert and Elia watch TV together until she gets bored and she takes Albert by his thumb and drags him back upstairs to sleep with Mommy. If Mommy has no yet gotten Curie down to sleep, the process repeats itself. Anyway the point is that at some point Elia will just fall asleep at Albert’s side. She loves to rest her head on his shoulder but there are times where she simply has sidles up to Albert. This month while watching Lilo and Stitch with Daddy late in the night she simply  made sure that her side was touching a part of Albert, and thus secured, closed her eyes, and fell asleep.